By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
curl-6 on 27 August 2023
Edit Thread
Biggerboat1 said:
curl-6 said:

It's not as easy as "just design a chip to play PS4 games natively" though, portable hardware is necessarily different from console hardware, so games built for PS4 would need to be reworked to run well on it. 

As for Ratchet on Steam Deck, that did require work; the ability to run at lower specs was a part of porting it to PC.

There will be PS5 games ported to run on Switch 2 and Steam Deck, just as there are PS4 games ported to the current Switch, but none of that comes for free, it all ties up development resources.

A new handheld would require a big investment and pull vital resources away from the PS5; they tried this before with the Vita and the result was disastrous.

I'm not suggesting it'd be easy, like any chip it'd require up-front investment. Numerous consoles have had backwards compatibility, though admittedly you'd have an added layer of difficulty working with a mobile SOC.

What I'm suggesting wouldn't require any work on the pre-existing PS4 library though, they'd run natively (or I suppose, be emulated at such high efficiency that it could work on a modern mobile chip). 

I genuinely don't know if it's possible, if you are an expert & know for sure it's not doable with today's tech then I'll take your word for it.

Also I've not claimed that porting a game is free, but it's orders of magnitude cheaper than creating games from the ground up for a single platform.

Developers would do their maths & decide whether the juice would be worth the squeeze, and that itself would come down to how well the platform is doing. As with Ratchet, games will be getting scaled down to run on low end machines, including a considerably weaker steam deck, so much of the work will already be done. 

A PS Deck wouldn't require any platform specific software so wouldn't demand resources like the PSP or Vita. 

There's a reason Sony hasn't gone ahead and made a new PS handheld in the 12 years since the Vita; they absolutely will have talked about it and weighed their options behind the scenes, but it's a big investment where the payoff is questionable.

Their solution is PS Portal; an option for small screen play with minimal investment.